SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

  Occasionally it is possible to see the effects of these conflicts trickling down into ordinary, everyday life. Pompeii was one of those little rebel towns that gained Roman citizenship after the Social War but was soon forced to welcome a couple of thousand ex-soldiers, who were given land that belonged to the locals. It was not a happy mixture. Although far fewer than the original citizens, the veterans soon made their presence aggressively felt. A couple of the richest of them sponsored a vast new amphitheatre, though that may have been as welcome an amenity to the original inhabitants as it was to the Sullan thugs who were predictably keen on gladiatorial spectacle. The record of office holding in the city for this period shows that the new colonists somehow managed to exclude the old families of the town. And in the 60s BCE, Cicero referred to long-running, chronic disputes at Pompeii about, among other things, voting rights. The knock-on effects of Sulla’s siege were still being felt on the streets of Pompeii decades later.

  The most vivid testimony, however, to the risks and dilemmas for the ordinary people caught up in these wars comes from a story about the outbreak of the Social War at Asculum in 91 BCE. An eager audience, a mixture of Romans and locals, was enjoying some shows in the town theatre when the drama moved offstage. The Roman part of the crowd had not liked the anti-Roman stance of one comic performer and attacked him so fiercely that they left the hapless actor dead. The next comedian on the bill was a travelling player of Latin origin and a great favourite with Roman audiences for his jokes and mimicry. Terrified that the other side of the audience would now turn on him, he had no option but to walk on to the stage where the other man had just been killed and to talk and joke his way out of trouble. ‘I’m not a Roman either,’ he said to the spectators. ‘I travel throughout Italy searching for favours by making people laugh and giving pleasure. So spare the swallow, which the gods allow to nest safely in all your houses!’ This touched them, and they sat back to watch the rest of the show. But it was only a brief comic interlude: soon after, all the Romans in the town were killed.

  It is a poignant and revealing story, which captures the point of view of an ordinary stand-up comic facing an ordinary audience, which on this occasion was not just hostile but potentially murderous. And it is a powerful reminder of the very fine line throughout this period between normal civic life – going to the theatre, enjoying a comic turn or two – and deadly massacre. Sometimes the swallows were not spared.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ·

  FROM EMPIRE TO EMPERORS

  Cicero versus Verres

  WHILE THE GRIM crosses were still lining the Appian Way in 70 BCE, the year after the final defeat of Spartacus’ army, Cicero stood up in a Roman court to prosecute Gaius Verres on behalf of a number of wealthy Sicilians. His aim was to get them compensation for the thefts and depredations of Verres while he was the Roman governor of their island. The case launched Cicero’s career, as he spectacularly defeated the established lawyers and orators lined up in Verres’ defence. In fact, so spectacular was Cicero’s success that after two weeks of what was set to be a long trial, Verres decided that the outcome was hopeless and, before the court reconvened after a holiday break, went into voluntary exile in Marseilles, with many of his ill-gotten gains. He lived on there till 43 BCE, when he was put to death in another pogrom of proscriptions that followed the assassination of Julius Caesar. The reason, ostensibly, was that he had refused to let Mark Antony have some of his precious Corinthian bronze.

  The case over, and keen not to waste his hard work, Cicero circulated in written form what he had said at the opening of the trial, along with the remaining speeches that he would have given against Verres had it continued. The full text of these still survives, copied and recopied throughout the ancient world and the Middle Ages as a model of how to denounce an enemy. Several hundred pages in all, it is a litany of lurid examples of Verres’ cruel exploitation of the inhabitants of Sicily, with flashbacks to earlier villainies before he reached the island in 73 BCE. It is the fullest account to survive of the crimes that Romans could commit abroad, under the cloak of their official status. For Cicero, the hallmark of Verres’ behaviour, in Sicily and in his earlier overseas postings, was a grotesque combination of cruelty, greed and lust, whether for women, cash or works of art.

  Cicero details, at enormous length, Verres’ grooming of innocent virgins, his fiddling of the taxes, his profiteering from the corn supply, and his systematic thieving of some of the famous masterpieces of Sicily, interspersed with poignant tales of the victims. He lingers, for example, on the plight of one Heius, once the proud possessor of statues by some of the most renowned classical Greek sculptors, including Praxiteles and Polyclitus, heirlooms kept in a ‘shrine’ in his house. Other Romans had admired these, even borrowed them. Verres turned up and forced him to sell them for a ridiculously low price. Even worse, according to the culminating anecdote in this anthology of crime, was the fate of Publius Gavius, a Roman citizen living in Sicily. Verres had Gavius thrown into prison, tortured and crucified, on the specious grounds that he was a spy for Spartacus. Roman citizenship should have protected him from this degrading punishment. So, as he was flogged, the poor man repeatedly cried out, ‘Civis Romanus sum’ (‘I am a Roman citizen’), but to no avail. Presumably, when they chose to repeat this phrase, both Palmerston and Kennedy (see p. 137) must have forgotten that its most famous ancient use was as the unsuccessful plea of an innocent victim under a sentence of death imposed by a rogue Roman governor.

  Judging a court case two thousand years old, when the arguments of only one side survive, and most of those written up later, is an impossible task. As prosecutors are almost bound to do, Cicero certainly exaggerated the wickedness of Verres, in a memorable but sometimes misleading combination of moral outrage, half-truths, self-promotion and jokes (in particular on the name ‘Verres’, which literally means ‘hog’ or perhaps ‘snout in the trough’). And there are all kinds of cracks in his argument that any decent defence might well have exploited. Dreadful as the punishment of Gavius was, for example, no responsible Roman official on Sicily at that date could have failed to be on the lookout for agents of Spartacus; in fact, Spartacus was widely reported to be planning to cross to the island. Whatever Heius’ regret at parting with his statues, and for such a low price, Cicero does concede that they were sold, not stolen (and anyway, were they really the original masterpieces they were cracked up to be?). Nevertheless, the defendant’s hasty departure suggests that he was guilty enough of the charges laid before him to make a tactical retreat into a comfortable exile seem the sensible option.

  This notorious case is just one of many controversies and dilemmas about Roman rule overseas that erupted during the last century of the Republic. By the 70s BCE, with vast territories under Roman sway as the result of two centuries of fighting, negotiation, aggression and good luck, the nature of Roman power and the Romans’ assumptions about their relationship to the world they now dominated were changing. In the broadest terms, the rudimentary empire of obedience had at least partly transformed into an empire of annexation. Provincia had come to mean ‘province’ in the sense of a defined region under direct Roman control rather than just ‘responsibility’ or ‘job’, and the word imperium was now occasionally used in the sense of ‘empire’. These shifts in terminology point to new concepts of Roman territory and a new framework of organisation, which raised new questions about what government abroad meant. How was a Roman governor expected to behave in the provinces? How was his job defined? What voice were the provincial populations to have, particularly in seeking redress against misrule? And what was to count as misrule? Issues of provincial government were brought into the very heart of domestic political debate. One precious piece of evidence for this is the text of the law under which Verres was prosecuted. It does not have the fame of Cicero’s showy rhetoric, but it takes us behind the scenes to Roman attempts to devise a legal framework, and practical arrangements, for the rights of provincials.
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br />   Even more controversial, and central to the eventual collapse of Republican government, were questions of who could be trusted with the command, control and administration of the empire. Who was to govern the provinces, to collect the taxes, to command, or serve in, Rome’s armies? Was the traditional governing class, with its principles of shared and short-term power, capable of handling the vast problems, administrative and military, that the empire now threw up? At the very end of the second century BCE, Gaius Marius, a ‘new man’, loudly blamed a string of Roman military defeats on the corruption of Rome’s commanders, always open to a well-placed bribe. He went on to base a political career on his ability to score notable victories where they had disastrously failed, and to be elected consul no fewer than seven times, five in a row.

  This was a pattern of repeated office holding that Sulla later banned, in his reforms of the late 80s BCE. But the underlying problem did not go away. The demands of defending, policing and sometimes extending the empire encouraged, or compelled, the Romans to hand over enormous financial and military resources to individual commanders for years on end, in a way that challenged the traditional structures of the state even more fundamentally than disputes at home between optimates and populares ever did. By the middle of the first century BCE, riding on the back of overseas conquest, Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar had become rivals for autocratic power: they commanded what were effectively their own private armies; they had flouted Republican principles even more comprehensively than Sulla or Marius; and they had opened up the prospect of one-man rule, which Caesar’s assassination did not block.

  In short, as the last part of this chapter reveals, the empire created the emperors – not the other way round.

  Governors and governed

  Verres is often seen as symptomatic of Roman rule abroad at this period, even allowing for gross exaggeration on Cicero’s part: a particularly rotten apple maybe, but one of a generally poor crop. The traditional assumption that military victory should turn into booty for the conqueror or that the defeated should pay for their defeat (as Carthage had done when Rome demanded vast reparations after the Second Punic War) died hard. Individual governors found that a posting overseas could be an easy opportunity for recouping some of the expenses of getting elected to political office in Rome, not to mention for pleasure of all kinds, away from the watchful eyes of their peers in Rome.

  In a rousing speech given on his return from a junior post in Sardinia, Gaius Gracchus had sharp words for his colleagues who went out there with ‘amphorae full of wine and brought them home brimming with silver’ – a clear criticism of their profiteering, as well as a hint of their dim view of the local grape. Roman rule was for the most part fairly hands off by the standards of more recent imperial regimes: the locals kept their own calendars, their own coinages, their own gods, their own varied systems of law and civic government. But wherever and whenever it was more direct, it seems to have fallen somewhere on the spectrum between ruthlessly exploitative at one end and negligent, under-resourced and inefficient at the other.

  Cicero’s experiences as governor of Cilicia in the late 50s BCE, described in vivid detail in his letters home, offer a glaring contrast to the depredations of Verres but still point to the messy reality of provincial government, with its endemic, chronic, low-level exploitation. Cilicia was a vast area of some 40,000 square miles in the wilds of what is now southern Turkey, with the island of Cyprus attached. Communications within the province were so unreliable that when Cicero first arrived he could not find out where his predecessor was, and three detachments of the two, under strength, underpaid and slightly mutinous, Roman legions stationed there seemed to have ‘gone missing’. Were they perhaps with the previous governor? No one knew.

  At this point, Cicero, who had no previous army experience except a short stint as a teenager in the Social War, seized the chance to grab a little military glory. After one successful skirmish against some of the more resistant locals in the mountains, he even preened himself for camping on the same spot as Alexander the Great almost 200 years earlier. ‘A not inconsiderably better general than you or I,’ he wrote to Atticus, either with wry irony or else stating the obvious. But most of the rest of his time was divided between hearing court cases that involved Roman citizens, adjudicating disputes between provincials, controlling the behaviour of his small staff, who seem to have specialised in insulting the local residents, and dealing with the demands of various friends and acquaintances.

  One young colleague in Rome pestered him to have some panthers caught and dispatched back to the city – to star, and be slaughtered, in shows he was putting on there. Cicero was evasive, claiming that the animals were in short supply: they must have decided to emigrate to the neighbouring province to escape the traps, he quipped. Less of a joking matter was a problem over loans made by Marcus Junius Brutus. The man who six years later led Caesar’s assassins was at this point up to his neck in usury, busy lending money to the people of Salamis, in Cyprus, at the illegal interest rate of 48 per cent. Cicero clearly sympathised with the Salaminians and withdrew the detachment of Roman soldiers that his predecessor had ‘lent’ to Brutus’ agents to help them extract what they were owed; they were said to have besieged the council chamber in Salamis and starved to death five of the local councillors. But then, rather than offend the well-connected creditor, he proceeded to turn a blind eye to the whole issue. His main priority, anyway, was to quit the province and the job of governor as soon as he legitimately could (‘the business bores me’). When his year was up, he walked out, leaving the vast region in the charge of one of his underlings, whom he admitted was ‘only a boy, probably stupid, with no authority or self-control’: so much for responsible government.

  Yet that gloomy picture is only one side of the story of Roman provincial administration. Brutally as Roman demands must have fallen on many people in the provinces – and probably more brutally on the poor, whose plight almost all ancient writers ignore, than on the rich who came to Cicero’s attention – exploitation was not unchecked. It is too easy to forget that the only reason the lurid details of Verres’ misdeeds survive is that he was put on trial, and disgraced, for his treatment of the Sicilians. And Gaius Gracchus’ reference to grasping Roman officials was intended to draw a contrast with his own upright behaviour in Sardinia, as the man who ‘brought back empty the money belts [he] had taken out full of silver’ and who never put his hands on a prostitute or a pretty slave boy. Corruption, money grabbing and sex tourism were matters of public criticism, accusations regularly levelled at political rivals and convenient weapons in character assassination. They were not, so far as we know, matters for public celebration or even smug boasting.

  Many of the tales of misdeeds were part of a wider discussion that began towards the end of the second century BCE about what the rules and ethical principles for overseas government should be, or – to put it even more generally – about how Rome should relate to the outside world when foreigners became people to be governed as well as fought. This was a distinctive, and novel, Roman contribution to political theory in the ancient world. Cicero’s earliest philosophical treatise, written in 59 BCE in the form of a letter to his brother, is largely concerned with honesty, integrity, impartiality and consistency in provincial rule. And a century before, in 149 BCE, a permanent criminal court had been established at Rome, with the main aim of giving foreigners compensation and the right of redress against extortion by their Roman rulers. No ancient Mediterranean empire had ever systematically tried to do this before. It may be a sign that corrupt government abroad started early. It also shows that there had long been a political will to tackle corruption. The law under which Verres was indicted, originally part of Gaius Gracchus’ reform programme, shows what an enormous amount of care, precision and sophisticated legal thought had been devoted to this problem by the 120s BCE.

  Eleven fragments of Gaius’ compensation law, inscribed on bronze, were discovered around 1500 CE
near Urbino in northern Italy. Two have since been lost and are known only from manuscript copies, but another was unearthed in the nineteenth century. Reassembled, in a jigsaw puzzle that has kept scholars occupied for half a millennium, they give us roughly half the text, which laid out the legal means for provincials to recover the value of what had been extorted from them by Roman officials, with damages on top. It is an extraordinary resource for understanding the practice and principles of Roman government, and an important reminder of the kind of information that, without such chance discoveries, easily slips through the net of the Roman historical tradition. For although Roman writers make passing allusion to this piece of legislation, they give no hint whatsoever that it was anything like what can be read here. The details have been preserved thanks only to the councillors of some Italian town in the late second century BCE, who decided to have the law inscribed on bronze for public display – and thanks to whoever stumbled across the fragments in the Renaissance and recognised their significance.

  This is Roman law at its most careful and precise, demonstrating sophisticated skill in legal draughtsmanship almost without parallel anywhere in the classical world before this date, and a far cry from the pioneering but crude efforts of the Twelve Tables. The surviving Latin text runs to about ten modern pages and goes through every aspect of the process of redress, from the question of who is allowed to bring a case (‘any man of the Latin name or of foreign nations, or within the discretion, dominion, power or friendship of the Roman people’) to the rewards and compensation that are to follow a successful prosecution (damages are set at double the loss incurred, and full Roman citizenship is offered to a successful prosecutor). In between, all kinds of problems are addressed. Assistance with the prosecution (a simple form of legal aid) is promised to those who needed it, as foreigners might well do. Provision is made for getting money out of men, like Verres, who bolted before the verdict was announced. There are also strict rules laid down governing conflict of interest: no one who belonged to the same ‘club’ as the defendant could serve as one of the fifty jurors assigned to each case. Even the precise method of voting is specified. Each juror must indicate his vote on a piece of boxwood of a particular size and drop it into an urn, with his fingers over the writing to conceal his decision – and with a bare arm, presumably to prevent any kind of fiddling going on under the folds of a toga.